The exact nature of the conflict between RTE and the Wexford Festival Opera that brought about the early exit of the National Symphony Orchestra from the 2001 festival is by no means clear. And what the festival's decision to hire an orchestra from Belarus really amounts to cannot be known until the festival opens next October and the newcomers are put through their paces in operas by Flotow, Dvorak and Massenet.
The reaction of most people to the Wexford decision has been one of surprise and shock. But the biggest surprise of all, surely, has to be simply the fact that it all took so long to happen, the biggest shock only the nationality of the players. For more than half a century, RTE has had a virtual monopoly on the provision of symphonic orchestral music in this State, as well as on the bulk of full-scale professional opera production. There was a time when all of this made sense. The establishment of the Radio Eireann Symphony Orchestra, and later the Radio Eireann Light Orchestra (now the National Symphony Orchestra and the RTE Concert Orchestra), were gestures which put everyone in the national broadcaster's debt. And there was a time when the monopoly that was thereby created seemed self-justifying.
But RTE's one-time position as a benign patron of the arts has long been under threat, and seems unlikely to survive as we know it through the raw commercial realities of broadcasting in the 21st century. RTE once provided the use of its orchestra more or less as a gift to the Wexford Festival. I say more or less, because it always got something valuable in return: the right to broadcast Wexford's uniquely attractive explorations of the rarely-trodden byways of operatic history.
It was during the 1980s that the winds of change first blew, and RTE began to rationalise the costs of its beneficence, and claw back cash from the festival. A gift that is not free is no gift at all, and the recent breakdown in negotiations was the inevitable outcome of trying to treat the NSO's contribution to the festival at one and the same time as a commercial transaction and a generous act of patronage.
RTE may well have been subsiding the NSO heavily in its participation in Wexford. But, clearly, even the subsidised fee was close enough to international commercial realities for the festival - in spite of the qualms it may have felt about the move - to reach over to Belarus for an alternative.
And it seems unlikely that cost alone would have driven Wexford to that decision. Last year's row over broadcasting rights had all the elements of an unresolvable conflict. RTE claimed an exclusivity which the festival denied and which would have driven away the BBC with its large audience in the festival's major foreign market.
Leaving aside the unknowable - the success of the new orchestra in the pit - the messages from the unexpected new development are actually largely positive. RTE's stranglehold on large-scale opera in Ireland, initially breached by the Anna Livia International Opera Festival last year, has finally been broken. Opera can be put on without the use of an RTE orchestra.
The fact that the players in Wexford will be from Belarus is a red herring. If opera is to develop in Ireland it needs to have an orchestra not tied to RTE schedules and restrictions. It is not in Opera Ireland's interests to be restricted to nine performances at a time, because RTE can't afford a longer release for the RTECO.
And it is certainly not in RTE's interests to have its orchestras tied up in the pit so much of their time. RTE is promising to use the extra NSO time next autumn with "a particular emphasis on developing its regional and community access activities", something promised as long ago as 1989, when the transformation of RTESO to National Symphony Orchestra was announced.
There is already a shining example of what can happen when the national broadcaster's musical monopoly is broken. The original Irish Chamber Orchestra, founded in the 1960s, was rendered unworkable by RTE. Its successor, the New Irish Chamber Orchestra, was founded in 1970 (dropping the "New" in 1986). It was dependent on RTE players until 1995, when it was re-established in Limerick as an entirely independent entity.
The transformation has been remarkable - not only in terms of playing standards, but also in the freedom it has offered in organising tours, bringing the sounds of a chamber orchestra to places in Ireland that have never heard them before, as well as flying the flag abroad.
The ICO's success is no criticism of RTE or its players. Nor is the suggestion that opera in Ireland would be better served by an orchestra set up for that purpose. The Arts Council, which puts in the region of half a million pounds a year into the Gaiety Theatre productions of Opera Ireland, has long made hay while RTE has been seen to be the main provider of orchestral music - and orchestras for opera - in this country.
It is surely time, now, for the Arts Council to live up to the new developmental role it is mapping out for itself, and face up to the fact that an independent orchestra for opera, contracted for the seasons in Dublin and the Wexford Festival, is an essential next step in developing the artform in Ireland. In the context of the proposed national academy for the performing arts, it would certainly also make sense for someone to be providing employment opportunities for the stream of graduates the new institution will produce.
